Technology and Disability in the Developing World: An Urgent Agenda for Low-cost Asssitive Technology

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) is a landmark in international agreements that has brought a rights-based perspective to disability into the policy environment of many signatory nations. To fulfill signatory nations' committments towards increased accessibility, there is an urgent need for widespread access to assistive technologies (AT). Focusing specifically on computing-based AT for people with vision impairments, we find that at present, much AT remains out of reach for most of the developing world, either because of a lack of language support, or quite simply due to outright unaffordability. In this talk, we discuss the convention broadly, the work of some of the early signatory nations, and specifically examine some of the key research directions in AT related to vision impairments. The purpose of this work is highlight the need for a research agenda in low-cost AT within the active community of researchers working on technology in the interest of society.

Speaker: Joyojeet Pal, Assistant Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Live broadcast at mms://media.citris.berkeley.edu/webcast; Questions can be sent via Yahoo IM to username: citrisevents. The complete schedule for the spring semester is online at http://www.citris-uc.org/events/RE-spring2011. All talks may be viewed on our YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/citrisuc.